Marie Alles Fernando

Marie Alles Fernando has spent more than fifty years painting the Sri Lankan landscape, and she paints it as a record of a rural life she sees passing. She works in watercolour, pastel and oil, from rapid sketches made on the spot as she travels and worked up afterwards on the canvas, and her subjects are the island’s country places and its sacred ones: the lotus ponds of Bolgoda, the birds of Anawilundawa, the monks at Anuradhapura, the fishermen of Mannar and Jaffna, the villages and temples and the lamplit nights of Vesak. She has called her own manner ‘impressionism bordering on expressionism with a touch of abstract’.

She trained privately between 1960 and 1968 under two teachers who between them set her direction. Ivor Baptiste taught her to paint in the open air, in front of the thing itself; Douglas Amarasekara, a professor of mathematics who kept an art academy besides, taught her the technique of the French Impressionists. Her mentor in the years that followed was Harry Pieris, the Secretary of the ’43 Group and chairman of the Sapumal Foundation, who thought enough of her work to paint her portrait.

Painting ran in her family before her. Her mother, Genevieve Edirisinghe, was an artist who gave her her first brushstrokes, and in 1970 the two held what is remembered as the first mother-and-daughter exhibition in the country, opened by the Governor-General, William Gopallawa. From there her work travelled widely. The Ceylon Society of Arts gave her its landscape prize in 1970 and later elected her to its executive committee; the Cultural Department sent her paintings to the International Triennale in New Delhi in 1975; and she showed at the Lionel Wendt in Colombo, at the Fukuoka Art Museum in Japan in 1985, and at the Ring Gallery in Vienna in 1986, where she studied for a season at the Academy of Fine Arts. In 1987 she was elected to the International Association of Art in Paris.

Her road has been her own. She kept clear of the collectives that shaped the island’s later contemporary art, the Theertha and Vibhavi circles, and worked instead in the older landscape tradition she had been raised in, founding her own Raintree Gallery in Colombo and painting on. She is painting still: recent exhibitions, ‘Colours that Sing’ in 2021 and ‘Ganbarimasu’ in 2023, carried the same purpose she began with, to hold on canvas a rural Sri Lanka that is quietly disappearing.

Sources

1. The artist’s own record. marieallesfernando.com.
2. Explore Sri Lanka.
3. Sunday Times, Colombo.